CUNY Board of Trustees Appoints Three New Distinguished Professors

Three outstanding scholars, all a part of the GC community, have been designated distinguished professors—the university’s highest faculty ranking—by the CUNY Board of Trustees as of July 1, 2012: Dagmar Herzog in history; Jeffrey T. Parsons in psychology and public health; and Pulitzer Prize winner John Matteson, who teaches biography at the Graduate Center and serves as deputy director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography.

Dagmar Herzog, distinguished professor of history and the GC’s Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar, is an internationally renowned authority on the history of religion in Europe and the United States, on the Holocaust and its aftermath, and on the histories of gender and sexuality. A 2012 recipient of the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for her work in intellectual and cultural history, Herzog has been a member of the GC doctoral faculty since 2005. A prolific writer and researcher, she is the author of Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History; Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics; Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany; and Intimacy and Exclusion: Religious Politics in Pre-Revolutionary Baden. She also has two new books in the works: With History in Mind: Psychoanalysis in a Postwar World and Reproductive Rights and Disability Rights in the European Union. Herzog earned her B.A. summa cum laude from Duke University and her M.A. and Ph.D. at Brown University. She was a Mellon Faculty Fellow at Harvard and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

John Matteson, deputy director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography since 2011, teaches biography through the GC’s interdisciplinary studies program while serving as a full-time member of the English faculty at John Jay College. A leading scholar of nineteenth-century American literature, he was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Biography for his first book, Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father. His second book, The Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Biography, about the nineteenth-century writer, social critic, and pioneer of American feminism, which came out this year, was written in part during his residency as an early Fellow of the GC’s Leon Levy Center. A Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Matteson has also contributed his scholarship to such organizations as the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association, the NEH Landmarks Program, the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, and the Biographers International Organization. He received a history degree cum laude from Princeton University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa; a law degree from Harvard; and, after working as a litigator in California and North Carolina, a Ph.D. in English from Columbia. In 2011 Matteson received the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Achievement by a Ph.D. Alumnus from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the Distinguished Faculty Award from the John Jay College Alumni Association.

Jeffrey T. Parsons, distinguished professor of psychology and public health at Hunter College and at the GC's Public Health (DPH) Program, is known as a leading global expert in four often overlapping areas of psychological and public health research: sexual health; substance use/abuse; the health of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) individuals; and, perhaps most prominently, HIV/AIDS prevention. Parsons, who has published more than two hundred papers in peer-reviewed journals in the past two decades, edited the book Contemporary Research in Sex Work and is currently the editor of the journal Sexuality Research and Social Policy. He is also the founder and director of the world-renowned Center for HIV/AIDS Educational Studies and Training (CHEST), www.chestnyc.org. His numerous honors include recognition from the American Psychological Association (APA) for Distinguished Scientific Achievement, designation as an APA Fellow, and appointments to several prominent advisory panels, including the White House Office on National AIDS Policy HIV and Aging Working Group since 2010, when he was also named to the Social and Behavioral HIV Prevention Research Think Tank by the National Institutes of Health Office on AIDS Research. Parsons completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Puget Sound and earned his doctorate in developmental psychology from the University of Houston.